Sunday, August 21, 2011

What's the hardest part about writing for you?

I was reading an article about how to find a good balance of Narrative > Action > Dialogue and it helped me highlight (in my mind) the biggest problem with how I write: my "style" is much much too Action heavy. This bogs down the flow of my story, makes it difficult for me to figure out how people get from point B to point C to point D because I'm buried under the details of them eating lunch and opening doors and running down stairs.

The reasons my writing is hampered in this manner are basically 2 fold.

  1. I purposefully made myself start writing like this several yrs ago after a second read-thru of Frank Herbert's Dune because if my memory serves his style is fairly action heavy in sections and I wished to emulate him (though I never did it more than very poorly). I also wanted to boost word counts and action description is a relatively simple and lazy way of doing just that.
  2. Most of the time when I write I see the story like a film in my head. And my instinctive desire is to portray the story in much the same ways you might a film, ie with long camera pans setting up scenes, locations, viewing action without words to highlight character action, changes and development. Often I find myself trying to capture, with words, the play of light and atmosphere and sound that a film gives you.

So balancing Narrative & Action is the hardest challenge I face when writing and the biggest thing I need to work on. What about you?

0 comments:

Post a Comment